Meta

Connect

Episode 32: Featuring the Best Use of Hangers Since……Cheap Bunny-Ear Antennae

This week’s installment is chock full of goodies for your listening pleasure! For starters, we realized back when we announced the winner of the Jeff Loomis giveaway , we did not take that opportunity to share who our favorite modern metal guitarists were, despite having asked you listeners to do just that. So, we decided that this week would be as good a time as any (better late than never, right?). However…even bigger than that…we have our FIRST featured music submission! After 31 episodes of requesting bands send us their music to play and/or review, South Australian band Goathanger graced us with their demo (which you can download for free by clicking HERE or on the album art on the right). Rounding out the show, Nick shares some of his favorite singles (like Brian did last week), we go back and take a second look at a few albums, and, as always, we review some new music.

Regarding bass players, it seems as though the role of the bass has devolved over the years. There used to be some prominent bass players that made impactful instrumental contributions to their band’s music, such as Geezer Butler, Steve Harris, Cliff Burton, Lemmy, Geddy Lee, and Les Claypool. But at some point the role of the bass seemed to fade into the background and become relegated to just playing along with the guitar or drums instead of standing out on its own.

I fully realize that my above statement is colored by two things. One is that I am a guitar player, so I tend to notice and be more interested in the guitar rather than the bass. Second is that as I get older I fully recognize that it is easy to fall into the attitude of “they don’t make them like they used to.” In my day, a bass had 4 strings and a guitar had 6 strings. But I’m not so old that I can’t recognize some great modern guitar players, but I am just not seeing any modern bass players who have grabbed my attention. I don’t doubt that some great bass players might be out there, so it would be interesting to hear who you guys (Nick) think are some top bassists.

I totally hear ya on that. And, if we play by the Metalsucks rules for their lists, Steve Harris still counts since Iron Maiden released an album in 2010. He is quite high on my list for sure! Steve DiGiorgio is also near the top. He’s been around for a long time now, but continues to put out mind blowing albums – on a fretless!

There are a lot of newer bands that have some fantastic bass players (Gorod comes to mind this week), but a lot of my picks would not come from the world of metal really. However, it’s a metal Podcast so I’m going to try to keep it constrained to that.

We’ll flesh out a real list later, but just a couple others that come to mind are Arif from Protest The Hero and Evan Brewer formerly of Reflux. UNREAL musicians!